Phew, I really had it coming. 
Too much too answer everything really. Maybe some short remarks:
- FishyJoe, do you have a source for the DS being out of stock before Christmas 2006? I believe it became sold out by the end of the Christmas season until February 2007. I'm not really familiar with DS figures though, would have to look into the quarterly reports.
- Shifts of a few weeks wouldn't count as stockpiling in my book. That's supply shaping. Stockpiling would have to be a retardation above, say, 2 months. That's what people have been claiming here, that Nintendo put 100k. 200k aside every month probably since July or March or even January. We've been having this argument for the whole year and Christmas will be the last chance for those stockpiles to come out of their wholes.
- I don't want to discuss this with weekly numbers from vgchartz. They are a) not that precise and I prefer to look at the monthly or quarterly aggregates, and b) don't track shipments but consumer sales, which is a difference that becomes more important with every passing month. If you want to know where the "missing units" in Jul-Sep went I'd say that Nintendo hit market equilibrium in Japan in August and have filled the channel in the following weeks. Proving stockpiling with Nintendo's shipment reports has now become much harder. With an announced production of circa 5.4 million they would have to ship well above 6 million this quarter, otherwise stockpiling cannot be deducted.
- The point that I wanted to make regarding the stockpiling debate was that Nintendo expressly intend to ship 5 million units after Christmas so the argument "they have to have a stockpile, otherwise they could never reach their forecast" doesn't hold anymore. Hypothetically, 4.7 million for this Christmas quarter would be enough to reach the forecast and more than that will already top the forecast, something everybody is expecting. For this debate to end we will have to wait until the next quarterly report in January or even the Annual Report in April.
Hardcore gaming is a bubble economy blown up by Microsoft's $7 $6 billion losses.
